Marco Rubio: Everyone spies on everyone

Sen. Marco Rubio dismissed the outrage from European leaders that the U.S. has been spying on them, saying, “everybody spies on everybody.”

“These leaders are responding to domestic pressures in their own countries, none of them are truly shocked about any of this,” Rubio (R-Fla.) said Friday on CNN’s “New Day.” “Everybody spies on everybody, I mean that’s just a fact.”

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Rubio’s comments follow reports this week that U.S. authorities had access to German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s cellphone. In Thursday’s briefing, White House press secretary Jay Carney said he wouldn’t “get into specific allegations.”

But Rubio brushed it off and said it is what’s expected in intelligence gathering, even among allies.

“Whether they want to acknowledge that publicly or not — and every country has different capabilities — but at the end of the day, if you are a U.S. government official traveling abroad, you are aware that anything you have on your cellphone, on your iPad, can be monitored by foreign intelligence agencies including that of your own allies,” Rubio said.

Rubio also addressed what will likely be the next legislative battle: immigration reform. Rubio emphasized his “preferred option” of a piecemeal approach, saying it will be the best strategy to tackle the contentious issue of a pathway to citizenship.

“I think it gets easier to address that issue if we deal with some of the other issues first and that’s why I’ve favored the sequential, individual bills,” Rubio said.

“I think if people have real confidence that the law is being enforced, that we’re not going to have this problem again, that there’s real border security, I think you buy yourself more space and more flexibility in finally dealing with those that are here illegally, but that’s the toughest issue of all,” he said.